It is generally difficult to accurately understand which areas are actually crowded and how crowded these areas are in facilities where people come and go or crowded facilities, including airports, station yards, shopping malls, and event venues. Conventional monitoring camera systems only display parts of images captured by a large number of monitoring cameras installed at facilities on displays in monitoring rooms. Consequently, it is difficult to quickly or objectively estimate the number of people with human eyes.
In recent years, VCA (Video Content Analysis) techniques have been intensively studied. The VCA techniques analyze images captured by monitoring cameras or the like using computers to automatically fetch information that has not been utilized before, and utilize the information. A technique of calculating the density of people (a congestion level) is known as a type of VCA (for example, see PATENT LITERATURES 1 to 7 and NON PATENT LITERATURE 1).
PATENT LITERATURE 1 discloses a stay condition analyzing apparatus that measures the stay frequency of a moving object in a target area, generates a heat map visualizing the distribution state of the stay frequency, and displays the heat map on a display device. The stay condition analyzing apparatus includes a positional information sorter that sorts positional information of a moving object obtained from a moving object detector based on whether the possibility that the positional information may include an error caused by partial missing of a traffic line of the moving object is high or low, a traffic-line missing position detector that detects the missing position of a traffic line based on at least two types of positional information sorted by the positional information sorter, a corrected distribution information generator that generates corrected distribution information including corrected stay frequency of the moving object based on a detection result of the traffic-line missing position detector, and a heat map generator that generates the heat map based on the corrected distribution information generated by the corrected distribution information generator.
In addition, a technique of verifying a person using two types of feature values is knowns as a technique relating to the present embodiment (for example, see PATENT LITERATURES 8 and 9).
Moreover, a technique relating to measurement, estimation, or prediction of people flows is also known (for example, see PATENT LITERATURES 10 to 12).